


The Ballad of Chloe Valentine

by heartsickhalfwit



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Alternate Universe, Chloe gets Squipped, F/M, M/M, Murder, Prom, The Ballad Of Sarah Berry, bad things happen to the gang, im sorry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 20:03:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14172387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartsickhalfwit/pseuds/heartsickhalfwit
Summary: It's Chloe's senior year, and she'll be damned if some one legged theater geek steals her crown.





	The Ballad of Chloe Valentine

**Author's Note:**

> A little warm-up two-shot to start my journey into fic writing. The plot is basically snatched straight from the very excellent, very dark track 'The Ballad of Sarah Berry' from 35mm The Musical. Check it out, it's catchy as hell.

“Have you seen this?” trilled Jenna excitedly, waving her phone in front of Chloe’s face with the smug grin of a teen girl who’s just uncovered another sparkling piece of Middleborough High gossip. 

Giving her friend (acquaintance? business partner??) a perfectly manicured eyebrow raise, Chloe unwound herself out from underneath her boyfriend’s arm to grab the iPhone bobbing up and down inches away from her nose. 

“This had better be good, Jen. Worth letting all the dirt and oil on your screen so close to my damn pores.”

“Oops. Sorry.” 

“Uhuh.” 

Jenna’s snapchat app was open, and the gossip queen reached her hand over to tap on the story of ‘BroadwayBoy378’ to reveal an image of a tiny Asian girl in front of a full length mirror. She’s smiling with her eyes crinkled up and pink tongue slightly poking out, throwing up a peace sign with the hand not curled around the shoulder of the gangly, acne spotted boy next to her. The image would be a totally normal (if not super unattractive and totally overdone on the cutesy stickers thinks Chole) if it wasn’t for the absence of the girl’s entire left leg below the knee, and the caption ‘Just released from the hospital!’

“Hey isn’t that Christine Canigula?” pipes up Jake, peering over her shoulder. “Whoa, what the hell happened to her?” 

Jenna looks positively gleeful as she explains the car crash last weekend that left their fellow senior an amputee, switching to the following photos that Christine’s apparent bff Jeremy (also one of Chloe's classmates though for the life of her she couldn’t remember seeing him before) had added to his snapchat. 

This included one of a boy in a red hoodie attempting to replace the missing appendage with a traffic cone from the street, the girls face frozen in laughter, and a selfie of the three teens at Denny’s. Apparently Christine had scored them a pity discount. Wild. 

Jenna passes the phone over so the other two inhabitants with a place at the school’s most exclusive lunch table can see. Rich, a short dude with a red patch in his hair to mirror his mean streak just laughs, but Chloe's best friend Brooke gives a sympathetic tut. 

“We should get everyone to sign a card for her!” the blonde eagerly suggests, but Chloe has decided that five minutes of her time is enough to waste thinking about other people so she just rolls her eyes and bids goodbye to the gang in favor of getting to the gym early for cheer practice. 

The thing about Chloe is that she’s been doing this her whole life. The values of being queen bee were instilled in her from an early age, ever since second grade when she convinced her whole class to ignore Lila Thompson after the unfortunate girl accidentally spilled orange paint down the front of Chloe's smock during arts and crafts hour. 

That feeling of power over her fellow man has been a drug that she’s chased ever since, aided by all the perks your standard popular bitch might need: hot body, hot jock boyfriend, her position as cheer captain on the squad, and most importantly her fabulous wealth. 

If Chloe’s parents were generous in material goods rather than emotional support, well, then that was a trade-off she was willing to take. If they didn’t love her, they wouldn’t have bought her that cute little hot pink mini for her sixteenth birthday, right?

They were just busy, is all. 

Her dad was always working at that fancy tech company and her mom would constantly join him on the frequent business trip to Japan. Quality time was hard to come by, by Chole didn’t need it, exactly. She had Brooke, who was always down for a gossip and a Starbucks latte. She had the undying attention and admiration of her faceless peers.

And if she ever craved that extra dash of parental approval she could always pull an all-nighter and nab the highest test score in AP Chemistry, or take her team to nationals, or enter the Little Miss New Jersey pageant for the fourth year in a row. And win, obviously. The previous reigning champion still hadn’t been seen in public after nasty business with the leaked images from her cell phone (she shouldn’t have called Chloe’s singing voice ‘flat and raspy’).

The thing about Chloe is she’s a girl who knows what she wants and knows how to get it.

And what she wants right now, what she’s been working her way up too since freshman year, is her crown. Prom is three weeks away, and by the end of her particularly fabulous campaign (she’d had Jake and Rich sneak up on the school roof three nights ago to hang a giant sparkly banner reading VOTE 4 CHLOE!) queen would be her title. 

And so it is with perfectly applied lip gloss and a killer pair of shoes that she prepares herself for another day of tireless campaigning. 

“Where do you want these?” asks her blonde best friend, lugging a cardboard box full of prom campaign posters out the trunk of her mothers car. The mini Chloe loved so much had broken down this morning, so Chloe had reluctantly accepted a ride from Brooke. No way was she going to be seen walking. 

“Everywhere, Brooke! I think the main hallway is priority though. I want it to be plastered with this gorgeous face!” she responds, smirking and striking a little pose to make Brooke giggle as they sashayed through the double doors and into the fray of Middleborough’s loud and unwashed teens. A voice pipes up from behind them as they make a beeline for the lockers.

“Ummm, you may have a little problem with that princess.” 

The girls turned to meet Rich’s smug little grin. Creep.

“Rich! Almost didn’t see you down there little guy! What the fuck do you want?” 

He scowled. “Sorry to burst your bubble your highness, but it appears that someone may have gotten there before you.” He gestured a little ways down the hall to where two guys were standing and putting up posters of their own. 

Brooke pouted a little, frowning. “Those guys are the ones from the snapchat story Jenna showed us yesterday, aren’t they? They’re just dweebs. I’m sure we can get them to take down their Dungeons and Dragons club advertisements or whatever it is they’re doing.” 

“The fuck is Dungeons and Dragons?” Rich asked. Brooke blushed and returned to sipping her morning skinny low-fat caramel latte. 

“Whatever it is they’re doing, no they fucking aren’t.” Chloe scoffed and marched her Gucci boots down to the boys, who were now attempting some sort of cirque du freak balancing act and waving around sticky tape to the amusement of the growing crowd around them. 

“Micah stop messing around!” The skinny one in a cardigan was half-laughing, half-groaning from on top of red hoodie boy’s shoulders. Had he not changed since yesterday? Gross. “I’m never gonna get these up before Chris arrives! 

“Too bad babe, cause I’m never gonna let you down!” whooped his boyfriend who proceeded to break into a Rick Astley number, tapping his white high-tops on the lino to the beat as the other one groaned and continued trying to hold up a corner of the poster despite being shaken around like a rag doll.

The poster in question is not, as Brooke had suspected, a nerdy enlistment call. The reality is so irritating that Chloe probably would have joined the goddamn Dungeons and Dragons club if it mean she hadn’t had to stare into the unfailingly sunny face of Christine Canigula at nine in the morning. 

Maybe not. 

Still, the realization that she now has actual competition for a title that is rightfully hers is so not how she thought this day would be going, and the news that Jenna gives her during lunch is even worse. 

“Yeah, Chlo, she’s actually in with a chance. I mean this Canigula girl isn’t exactly popular yet, but her surgery means she’s gaining sympathy followers on practically every social media account. Even her tumblr, which as far as I can tell is just several thousand pictures of kittens.” Jenna furrowed her eyebrows at her screen. This was a totally unfactored change in hierarchy and she didn’t like being surprised. 

“I get that.” pipes up Brooke “Like, she’s weird, but a cutesy kind of weird.”

“Plus she’s actually nice. Remember she was the one who insisted the school donate half the proceeds of the play a few years ago to a women’s shelter?” Jake reminisces absentmindedly, only noticing Chloe’s glare when Rich starts to snicker at her. “Oh! Babe! Not that you’re not nice! You’re super nice. You’re great!” 

Chloe was not nice. She especially was not nice when some geeky theater bitch tried to nudge onto her turf. Having Madeline and Brooke in the running was obviously just for show, and both of them would willingly stand by, smile and wave and let Chloe take the crown because, duh. That's the way it was.

The girl, however, was totally outside the natural order of things. 

When Christine had finally come along and noticed her friends’ handiwork this morning she had practically cried out of joy, and everyone standing in the hall just ate that shit up, cooing over her as she tried to hug the pair. It hadn’t worked super well because Christine was still struggling to get used to her new situation plus the crutches and the skinny one was still on hoodie boy’s shoulders, so the three ended up in a pile on the ground. And people had actually helped them up? Instead of laughing and taking embarrassing photos? 

What was this world coming too?

Even worse, Hoodie Boy and Skinny had turned out to be Rich’s two main targets for what he called ‘social adjustment’, which was basically asshole for “I like to beat them up behind the dumpster because I’m a sexually repressed dumbass who hates other people’s happiness.” Chloe was totally fine with gay people, she watched RuPaul’s drag race all the time thank you very much, but she appreciated the midget’s equally irritated response to the three suddenly gaining the good graces of Middleborough. As a rule the kids would generally avoid his targets like the plague and he was frustrated.

It gave her some sort of ally at least, and she needed all the sympathy she could get because her parents were less than pleased.

Chloe had explained the situation over a rare Skype call from them a few days later. She was surprised to hear from them honestly, but it was kind of like they had a sixth sense for knowing when she was about to fail, and they weren’t about stand by and let something as important as prom ruin their daughter’s reputation. Her failures would reflect badly upon the Valentine name. 

“Chloe, darling, life is a prom. Your crown is another step on your ladder to success!” cooed Marissa Valentine, waving two inch long neon pink nails in dismissal as her daughter described Christine. “You have to beat this little nobody.”

Roy Valentine, who had appeared deep in thought for the majority of the conversation, tried his best to give his daughter a stern look through the grainy webcam. “I know you won’t disappoint me and your mother, after all we’ve given you.”

Chloe shook her head.

“But we can't be be too careful, can we now princess? I’m sending you over a little something that might help. But we must fly sweetheart, meeting in ten. Bye!” 

Chloe watched the image of her parents disappear into black on he laptop screen before she could respond. What the hell did her father mean by that? Some sort of new skin product her mother had picked out perhaps- she was always scrutinizing Chloe’s giant pores. Or maybe a new set of fliers her father’s marketing team had been forced to create during their break, just like the time she ran for student body president in grade school. Whatever it was, it couldn't come fast enough.


End file.
